Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Parvati Valley to Shimla


Wow-so Kasol in Parvati Valley turned out to be an absolute shit hole! We should not have taken the advice of the Israeli hippy chick in Manali who told us it was the best place she’d been. Well-the best place maybe if you want to smoke Chillum all day. Kasol is in a valley surrounded by beautiful snow covered mountains (the nearest we’ve stayed to big mountains so far, so that was great) But the actual town is shanty full of crappy hotels & Arabian style hangouts for the hippies to smoke day in & day out. We walked over to another town full of Indians which was much better. The place had a large temple and was where Indians go to bathe their ailments away in the hot sulphur waters. The indoor baths resemble what one might imagine an Indian prison to be like-dark & dirty-all old stone with long dark passage ways to ancient keyhole toilets. Quite an amazing site in all. As always the Indians chatted to us the whole while & we even met a girl who worked in the Payless shoe store in Flushing, Queens who was there to visit her family.

Apart from this great interlude however, there was not much going on in the town of Kasol apart from late night rave parties and home made fireworks being set off. After meeting a Polish guy who’d been stuck in India for 7 yrs awaiting a trial for a drug possession charge we were outta there. His whole story was depressing and sad and it seemed he faced at least 4 more yrs until his trial actually would occur after which he faced 10 yrs in jail. He told us other stories of foreigners caught on drug possession charges and who’d been in prison for years. It made that series I like to watch is the US “Locked Up Abroad” all the more real as it seemed like a very common occurrence.

So we hotfooted it out of this shit hole and bussed our way for about 8 hrs to the beautiful town of Shimla. Now THIS is a lovely place. We managed to get a really great hotel room which is huge and bright and overlooks the whole of Shimla. We’ve yet to really explore as we’ve been sorting out the next leg of our journey to Delhi. We’ve decided to skip Chandigar as it’s all to much of a hassle and not a convenient “stop on the way” as we thought it was going to be. So we’ll get a “luxury” bus to Delhi (about 10 hrs) and as our flight leaves at 5am there’s no point in getting a hotel room for that night, so we’ll just get a meal & hangout at the airport. I say “just” but I KNOW the experience of waiting at Delhi airport will be a nightmare possibly above all others we have endured. Delhi airport is an absolute hell hole so we’re gonna have to prepare ourselves for this really uncomfortable interlude. We’ve at least reserved already a hotel room in Mumbai so we shan’t have to be trotting around in the severe heat of Mumbai when we get there, so we are sorted with regard to all our travel plans until we get back to New York. We are winding down now and kind of losing energy on this last leg & looking forward to our final flight home. Still stuff to do in Shimla though and after that Mumbai..

Ok-So we’ve now spent a few days exploring the beautiful town of Shimla. It is full to bursting with Indian holiday makers who have escaped to this large hill town from their hot cities. Their evenings are spent walking Italian style through the Mall which is a long stretch of town lined with cute little shops selling everything you could want. Once you cut through this promenade you dive down into the “real Shimla” which is an enormous rabbit warren of tiny narrow streets which climb up and down the hillside cramped to the gills with people, bizarres & tiny shops. It is the real old Shimla. The architecture of the buildings is beautiful and dates back to the time of the British Raj. Some of the houses look like they’d fit very easily into rural parts of England and Scotland. We’ve spent our days tramping round the hills up & down & around. The hills are sometimes so steep that they are practically sheer & sometimes have little steps along the side to help the climb. There are large areas of woodland and tiny villages which see maybe one bus a day and have maybe a farmhouse a couple of little shack shops and a small school. The schools here are supposedly some of the best in the country founded by the British and the whole place is speckled with little groups of school children in neat uniforms holding hands (as is the Indian way) and reading text books as they walk & talk through the picturesque streets. We’ve spent more than enough time here however, and though we have a lovely hotel room as I mentioned, we were rather horrified last night to espy a rat running across the floor of our room. We’ve jammed up the holes now and hopefully he won’t appear again tonight! He was pretty large but seemed more terrified by us than the infamous NYC rats. Next stop Delhi (the grueling 10 hr journey ) and then we fly to Mumbai.

Our last day here in Shimla and something rather untoward occurred. Upon hearing that our hotel doesn’t accept credit cards we spent the morning in blind panic visiting every bank here trying to get a cash advance on any of our credit cards. Unlike all the other cities we’ve visited in India no one will give a cash advance on a credit card. As we’re leaving tomorrow morning the whole thing was absolutely horrendous. By an incredible stroke of luck the really sweet guy who’s internet facilities we’ve been using near our hotel basically just coughed up enough cash for us to pay the hotel bill and get us to Mumbai. I cannot think of anyone who’d do this on blind faith like this. He’s given us his bank account details and we’ve promised him that once in Mumbai we’ll deposit the money he loaned us into his account. We could easily just take off with the money and that’d be that. But he is just a “good guy”-Amazing. Of course he’ll be rewarded and we shall deposit more money into his account than he gave us as he has done us such an enormous favor.




























































































2 comments:

  1. experience very nicely described, but i disagree on the Kasol part..
    for more such posts checkout www.wuhooo.com

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  2. ai thanks for the link. It seems maybe we didn't give Kasol a big enough chance. However, after experiencing Old Manali (I say Old Manali as New Manali was totally different) and the sad way the place was overun with foreigners (Israelies mainly) smoking hash all day, by the time we reached Kasol we were over it and had no more time for the hippy chullum life. Sure, there was tons of beauty in the woods and mountains, and maybe more than we'd seen in any of the other places we'd been to. But it was also, of course, filthy near anywhere that people resided as they'd tip all their rubbish into the river (as with most places in India). This always somewhat spoils the natural areas in India for me. Though of course, India is big enough to get away from civilization so you don't have to experience nature which is constantly spoiled by humans.

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